All doctors all dentists all offices down narrow halls all windows view a city with squalor goneThe rag-stuffed broken framesthe broken faces in Grand Time Hotel gutter litters spittles shredsvanish into cornered sections from up herethe grid blocks fit like the cells in a maple leaf

A stately pattern dances There’s a thin bridge of dazzle a gray-white glowing

The long view

The lion catsAnd celtic knots

Stately Measures, III

only abundant confidence supports

the bridge rocks slowly we all trust the trainI have the harbor sunset at my back

being private in public a big city joy

Handel swings his stately measures always fit for city lifesaluteto the god of kings on Fishamble Streetsalutewith bawdy castrati dishing the Haymarket swells

The Essence of All That Use

The thing The thing The thingLook at what it holds embedded in or of it

My guidebook claims Rome’s first orange tree, broughtfrom the Middle East 1200 years ago, is still alive in a monastery gardenYou may peer at it though a hole in the wallWe didn'tBut we did see the cedar, supposedly planted by Michelangelo in a cloister gardenlike a giant bonsai, half dead, twisted, held upright with wires

The insistence makes us think of home of brilliant anger streaming in our wake Old Rome, new worldIs the snow melting yet?

Martha King, born Martha Winston Davis in Virginia in 1937, attended Black Mountain College briefly as a teenager, and married the painter Basil King in 1958. They have lived in Brooklyn since 1969. Her recent books are Imperfect Fit:Selected Poems, Marsh Hawk, 2004, and North & South, a collection of short stories, Spuyten Duyvil, 2006.